As has become annual tradition, details on the next season of American Horror Story have begun leaking in cryptic drips and drabs, before Ryan Murphy inevitably spills everything. While viewers await hints to be dropped in the upcoming eleventh episode, Murphy says, what we know about the future is this: Contrary to earlier reports, AHS has abandoned any idea for a spinoff of Coven, after Murphy realized it would get in the way of killing off his characters. “We were starting to break episode 8 or 9 and we were like, ‘Well, we can’t kill that person off because we need them for the spin-off,” Murphy tells Entertainment Weekly. “As soon as those words were said, I was like, ‘There is no spin-off.’ Because it took away from the joy of the show. The reason the show is successful is no one is safe ever.”
Next year, the characters who aren’t safe from Murphy’s bloodlust won’t be “contemporary,” he says, with the season taking place in some yet-to-be-announced timeline that isn’t the present—and that’s all we know. Though now we also know this: “It’s either going to shoot in New Orleans or it’s going to shoot in Santa Fe.” So according to our deductions, it will either find Jessica Lange’s “Marlene Dietrich-type figure” exploring some other corner of New Orleans’ haunted history, or she’ll be hiding underground in a futuristic Santa Fe, in a terrifying age where turquoise kokopellis roam the earth looking for humans to make into jewelry.